Up-to-date information in a wide variety of areas is very important to many people. These people often desire to be alerted to time-sensitive events and information. Content providers generate content for notifications, which are then delivered to one or more user electronically (e.g., via electronic mail). For example, a news organization may provide notification content relating stock prices, breaking news, weather conditions, traffic conditions, etc. A user's expressed interest to receive electronic notifications for a particular class of content is generally called a notification subscription. Such subscriptions often are made between the end user and the content provider that sends the notifications. Event-driven notifications of this type are often referred to as alerts.
An alerts application typically consists of an event feed component, multiple subscription offerings, mapping of events to notifications for subscription offerings, a signup user interface, and final notification formatting to be delivered to subscribers. Disadvantageously, conventional alerts technology places a heavy burden on either the content providers or the alerts notification service for managing and generating notifications. A hosted alerts system is desired to quickly develop and host alerts applications based on content feeds from interested content providers. In such a system, however, content providers are required to develop a custom alerts application each time aspects of the application changes. This results in additional and undesirable development and deployment time. For example, the ability for a retailer to quickly and easily deploy a notification involving a new special offer involving certain goods to a particular set of subscribers in a matter of hours rather than weeks could provide a significant competitive advantage.
Accordingly, faster development and deployment of notifications is desired to address one or more of these and other disadvantages.